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Friday, 28 December 2012

Bloomberg Game Changers' series - A great way to procrastinate

If you're sitting in your office in the period between Christmas and New Year with little to do and you're interested in finance, then an interesting way to waste time is the great Bloomberg Video series - Game Changers.

The series covers entrepreneurs and giants in the worlds of business who have changed the way in which they changed the industries that they have worked in. Most of the series that I have been watching involve business people however the series is much more broad than this - it also covers authors such as JK Rowling, political commentator and comedian John Stewart and singer Jay Z. I confess that I found the John Stewart profile fascinating but the others were not really my cup of tea.

You can visit the main site here (all the videos are free) however I have embedded below a few of the clips (which are hosted on YouTube as well). To be honest, I would not really browse YouTube for these clips as it comes with advertisements while Bloomberg is almost advertisement free. Each of the videos is between 25 and 50 minutes in length. The ones I found most fascinating were not the ones whose stories are well known (e.g. Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs) but rather those who we know are famous but are a little more obscure (such as the Koch brothers).

A selection of my favourite videosWarren Buffett

Rupert Murdoch
I could not find a version I could embed of the Game Changers episode on Rupert Murdoch so I have included a link to it here.
What I found fascinating when I watched this episode was how much Jeffrey Archer, the renowned novelist, had based one of the two main protagonists in his book The Fourth Estate on Rupert Murdoch. If you have some free time and want to read a fictionalised account of his life and his rivalry with Robert Maxwell then I suggest reading that book.Koch Brothers
As mentioned above the episode on the Koch Brothers was one I found fascinating because I knew so little about them. Like the Rupert Murdoch episode I could not find this episode on YouTube so have linked to it here so you can watch it.

If you find any other episodes that you think are worth watching please let me know about them in the comments below